Iterative Design of Advanced Mobile Robots
Journal of Computing and Information Technology 1 Iterative Design of Advanced Mobile Robots Fran¸coisMichaud1∗, Dominic L´etourneau1 Eric´ Beaudry2, Maxime Fr´echette1, Froduald Kabanza2, and Michel Lauria1 1Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, Universit´ede Sherbrooke, Qu´ebec Canada 2Department of Computer Science, Universit´ede Sherbrooke, Qu´ebec Canada Integration of hardware, software and decisional com- 1. Introduction ponents is fundamental in the design of advanced mo- bile robotic systems capable of performing challenging The dream of having autonomous machines perform- tasks in unstructured and unpredictable environments. ing useful tasks in everyday environments, as un- We address such integration challenges following an it- structured and unpredictable as they can be, has erative design strategy, centered on a decisional archi- motivated for many decades now research in robotics tecture based on the notion of motivated selection of and artificial intelligence. However, intelligent and behavior-producing modules. This architecture evolved autonomous mobile robots is still in what can be over the years from the integration of obstacle avoid- ance, message reading and touch screen graphical inter- identified as being research phases, i.e., mostly basic faces, to localization and mapping, planning and schedul- research and concept formulation, and some prelimi- ing, sound source localization, tracking and separation, nary uses of the technology with attempts in clarify- speech recognition and generation on a custom-made in- ing underlying ideas and generalizing the approach teractive robot. Designed to be a scientific robot re- [Shaw 2002]. The challenge in making such a dream porter, the robot provides understandable and config- become a reality lies in the intrinsic complexities urable interaction, intention and information in a con- and interdependencies of the necessary components ference setting, reporting its experiences for on-line and to be integrated in a robot.
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